If you were only to listen to politicians and policy makers, you could be forgiven for harboring two delusions: first, that the sole purpose of schooling is to create the workforce of the future; second, that the only place that our students learn is at school. If you believe that preparation for work is at least a part of education’s function, at what point do educators have a responsibility to face the radically changing employment patterns facing our students? And how can we re-think schooling to complement, not compete with, their informal learning?

My argument, here and in my book, OPEN: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn in the Future, is that the discourse surrounding formal learning is becoming ever further detached from the lessons we see when learning happens outside formal boundaries. The grades that individual students receive for their school projects matter little compared to the comments found on their blogs, or their Vimeo accounts. Rising numbers of parents, frustrated by the worksheet culture of their child’s classroom, are self-organizing and co-creating local home-learning networks.

According to social forecasts in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, the point at which our labor market has more freelancers than full-time employees is between 5 to 10 years away. The growing automation of knowledge work means that, globally, we are expected to lose around 2 billion jobs by 2030. Some of that loss will be softened by new jobs created, but they’re going to be of the low-paid, temporary, variety. Today’s university graduates are facing what has been termed a “high skills/low income” future. The recent rapid growth in “knowledge process outsourcing” — the breaking up of salaried jobs into bid-for tasks, through websites like Elance.com and Freelancer. com — may well be transforming economies of developing countries like India, but it is causing futurists in the west to predict “the end of job.”

2. The Revolution In How We Now Learn

It is perhaps a measure of how open our learning has become, that the exchange of knowledge among anybody with an Internet connection, has become ubiquitous. Much of it may have once been frivolous: pictures of cats playing the piano and the like. But now it ranges from the personal/professional, through blogging and other forms of social media, to the political. The phenomenal success of campaign groups like Avaaz and 38 Degrees give the lie to the stereotype of young people who are politically disengaged.

The learning which is taking place socially is also purposeful: we have more control over our lives now, and we learn so that we can collectively take action, often driven by values and humanitarian concern.

Because socially-connected learning has crept up on us, we have not seen it for the true revolution that it represents. In addition, although high-profile examples of abuse are often scandalized in popular media, the value of peer-to-peer informal learning is absent from policy discussions on education.

BACK TO BASICS

Instead of a forward-focused public discussion on the challenges of the labor market, or the opportunities presented by informal learning, what we have seen and heard from politicians and policy-makers tends to be a nostalgic desire to return to the certainty of “the basics.” Such nostalgia is bolstered by the PISA performance of countries favoring traditional pedagogies (whilst neatly avoiding the inefficiency of learning systems that, in order to be successful, require students to work longer hours than 19th century English child factory hands).

While this myopic and somewhat irrelevant argument takes place, the gulf in motivation between the learning that our students have to do, and the learning that they choose to do, grows ever wider. Meanwhile, the implementation of standardized testing and high-stakes accountability leaves a devastating legacy of what Yong Zhao calls side effects: increasing student (and staff) disengagement; perceived irrelevance of formal education; and the loss of autonomy and trust in the teaching profession.

If we want to re-engage learners, re-professionalize teachers, and re-think how we prepare students for a globally competitive working life, we need to follow the learners, and develop more open learning systems.

Transparency is not a word often associated with education. For many parents, the time between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. can feel like a mysterious part of their child’s life. Questioning students about their school day often results in an unsatisfying answer and not every parent has the time to be in constant communication with their student’s teacher.

For teachers, transparency can have a distinctly negative connotation. In the political debate, the word is often used in connection to hot button issues like posting teacher salaries and benefits publicly or publishing test scores. And within the school walls, transparency can feel like judgement. Teachers can see principal visits as inspections, not respectful check-ins to offer encouragement and suggestions. No school is the same and dynamics between teaching staff and the administration are different everywhere, but for many teachers the classroom is a sacrosanct, personal space.

“I try to become a bridge between the quantifiable and the qualifiable.”

But what if teachers embraced the idea of transparency as a form of activism, a way of shining light on what works in the classroom? “The minute we say, ‘Come look and talk to the students,’ we can show what we’re all about,” said Jose Vilson, an educator and panelist at EduCon in Philadelphia. “If we can do that with a sense of trust and expertise, with respect for ourselves and others, then we can have a pro something instead of an anti-something.”

Opening one’s classroom to public scrutiny isn’t an easy thing to do. “In order for us to get more people involved, some of us are going to have to be twice as involved, go twice as deep and explain what we are doing in the classroom,” Vilson said. That means being vulnerable and willing to defend teaching practices to anyone who asks. But by welcoming a variety of voices into a discussion about what drives powerful learning experiences, and why certain teaching practices work and others don’t, the process becomes participatory. Everyone shares the responsibility for changing a system that matters to the future of the country.

At Mission Hill School in Boston every structure in the school is based on transparency. “Openness is the willingness to be disturbed,” said Ayla Gavins, principal of Mission Hill. At her school, teachers lead the effort to be transparent with one another and families and everyone else in the building tries to support that work. The school also has structures in place to support that kind of openness such as weekly meetings, short meetings before or after school and retreat time. There’s an understanding on her staff about what times of the day suit different kinds of meetings.

As the leader of the school, Gavins believes that commitment to openness extends to school decisions. When Mission Hill had its budget reduced by the district, a group of teachers came together to figure out how to hire a new teacher with less money, and do it with the culture and integrity of the school in mind. Operating out in the open comes with a different level of accountability. Decision makers have to be prepared to explain and defend tough choices. Still, Gavins found this process less destructive to school morale and mission when done democratically than if she had made the decision herself.

Being transparent is a decisive action and can be used as a tool.“Take advantage of your captive audiences,” Gavins said. She encourages her teachers to share their vision for the classroom in letters home to parents. That letter can be an important communication tool teachers have at their disposal to help parents understand why they are doing what they are doing.

Social media is another way for teachers to be transparent about what’s happening in the classroom. Teachers can even feed parents informed questions to ask their children at home, to continue and share learning that happens at school. With a little more knowledge about what happened that day, parents won’t be stuck asking the generic, “What did you do in school today?”

Test scores continue to dominate the public conversation about how well a school or teacher is performing. But a teacher willing to be open about what goes on in the classroom can help provide a different narrative. “I try to become a bridge between the quantifiable and the ‘qualifiable,’” Vilson said. He wants to give the story behind the numbers, the narrative that makes those numbers matter.

“We can find a way to create a balance between, ‘Here’s the story and here’s some reflective and introspective evidence,’ put it all together and see what’s going on,” Vilson said. “Right now, I feel like our narrative is being controlled by one side.”

Educators who want to see change in the way classrooms are run and how priorities are set have the difficult job of meeting today’s needs while keeping an eye on the future. “You can’t forget what your kids need right now,” said Gavins. “And as you are preparing for the future you need to put some things in place to make a change.”

One way to promote change is to allow the outside world to see inside innovative classrooms, hold up positive narratives and be sure everyone knows the consequences of seemingly distant policy decisions.

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This week, the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of OpenCourseWare. The movement to make university-level content freely and openly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put the materials from all 2,000 of the university’s courses on the Web.

With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described in her opening remarks at yesterday’s meeting as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: “the tradition of the global intellectual commons.”

We have looked here before at how OCW has shaped education in the last ten years, but in many ways much of the content that has been posted online remains very much “Web 1.0.” That is, while universities have posted their syllabi, handouts, and quizzes online, there has not been — until recently — much “Web 2.0” OCW resources — little opportunity for interaction and engagement with the material.

But as open educational resources and OCW increase in popularity and usage, there are a number of new resources out there that do offer just that. You probably already know about: Khan Academy and Wikipedia, for example. But in the spirit of 10 years of OCW, here’s a list of 10 cool OER and OCW resources that you might not know about, but should know:

P2PU: The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project in which anyone can participate. Volunteers facilitate the courses, but the learners are in charge. P2PU leverages both open content and the open social web, with a model for lifelong learning.

OpenStudy: OpenStudy is a social learning network where independent learners and traditional students can come together in a massively-multiplayer study group. Through OpenStudy, learners can find other working in similar content areas in order to support each other and answer each others’ questions. OpenStudy supports a number of study groups, including those focused on several MIT OCW courses.

NITXY: NIXTY is building a learning management platform that supports open education resources. Rather than an LMS that closes off both academic resources and academic progress, NIXTY is designed to support open courses so that schools, teachers, and students’ work is not necessarily closed off from the rest of the Web.

OER Glue: Still under development, OER Glue will be a site to watch. The Utah-based startup is building a browser-based tool that will allow students and teachers to “glue” together OER resources online. Rather than having to copy-and-paste resources into a new setting, OER Glue will reuse and integrate resources.

iUniv: iUniv is a Japanese startup that is building web and mobile apps to support and make social video and audio OCW content. Resources can be shared to Twitter, Facebook, and Evernote so that students can actively engage in discussions around OCW content.

OCWSearch: OCW Search is a search engine dedicated, as the name suggests, to helping learners find OCW content. The project is, unfortunately, no longer under development, but it does index ten universities’ OCW content, including MIT, Notre Dame, and The Open University UK.

Smarthistory: Smarthistory is a free and open multimedia website that demonstrates how very heavy, pricey, and obsolete the traditional art history textbook is.

CK-12: The CK-12 Foundation’s Flexbook platform provides free, collaboratively-built and openly-licensed digital textbooks for K-12. Much of the content is standards based.

Flat World Knowledge: This is a college textbook publisher whose books are published under an open license. This allows professors to customize the books they order – edit, add to, mix-up – or use as-is. Students can access the books online for free or can pay for print-on-demand and audiobook versions.